If any of you have been following my posts recently you'll notice that my new CEO has been breaking my balls. But this time he has come up with a valid point (every could and all that). We used to have a GPO that synced user's Desktops and My Documents to somewhere on the server (I can't recollect where at the moment). We dropped that GPO as it was causing some issues with our Windows XP machines (again another detail I am struggling to remember, maybe the lesson here is to document more). Anyway instead of that GPO we now use Mapped individual User Shares so anything that needs to be backed up / safe we advise user's to put it in there. However my CEO chose to ignore this fact and recently lost some of his documents. Which got me to thinking, could we sync My Documents and Desktop with a user's User Share?

Have you thought about doing it through Active Directory or Group Policy? We had the same issue here so we went in and redirected everyone's My Documents to their shared drive after we copied everything up that was currently in their documents.

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Have you thought about doing it through Active Directory or Group Policy? We had the same issue here so we went in and redirected everyone's My Documents to their shared drive after we copied everything up that was currently in their documents.

Mike has it. I will caution you to test this thoroughly though. We attempted to do that here 2 years ago and at first it went very well and then some of our legacy apps that needed access to user folders they expected on the local machine blew up when they were on the server.

We've since removed the GPO (deleted not disabled - huge mistake) and things have gone back to mostly normal.

I think it's a great idea if you have quotas in place and it is tested thoroughly.

Right now since we're on W7 I just set the save location to the user's folder and setup offline access.

Mike has it. I will caution you to test this thoroughly though. We attempted to do that here 2 years ago and at first it went very well and then some of our legacy apps that needed access to user folders they expected on the local machine blew up when they were on the server.

Yes, I do run into that every once in a while! Usually just changing the UNC path to a drive letter fixes it. e.g., If you mapped H: to a server and redirect My Documents to H:\Documents, it usually fixes the problem. Either that, or just tell them "For this application, navigate to the H: drive; don't use My Documents." Since they're both the same location, you're golden.

Of course, I have had issues the other way around too...mostly "run as" problems, since the drive letter doesn't exist as the other user. It's not a big deal for the end user though because they don't need to do that...unless the application runs as another user. You just can't win sometimes! :)

I hate offline files/synch'd files. What we did was push out robocopy to all xp machines (windows 7 has it built in). I then wrote a log off script using robocopy that mirrored their desktop and my docs folder and put them on the server. The live data remiained on their local workstation, but we had a full copy of all their stuff on the server.

I personally despise the way XP handles offline files. Its always been a problem for us. But this method gave us the best of both worlds.

The first logoff was painful as it copied all of their data and if they had a lot it took a while. But after that first one it only added a few seconds to the logoff as robocopy examined the files.

Worked for us and hopefully for you.

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